The use of labels to describe the contents, utility and benefits of a packaged product and, thereby, to advertise that product to a prospective customer, is as old as the use of containers that hold and display such products.
The typical product label provides only a fixed and unchanging description of the packaged product. We shall call such a label a “static” label. The purpose of the static label is twofold. First, it is an advertisement, whose appearance is meant to attract the eye of a potential customer. Typically, to fulfill this function, the static label displays pictorial content that is recognizable as designating a particular brand in which the customer may or may not have confidence and to which the customer may or may not be loyal.
Second, and perhaps most important, the label conveys information about the contents of the packaged product being considered by the customer for purchase. This information can be in the form of a written description or it can also be pictorial in nature. Additional material may be printed on portions of the label to give the purchaser instructions as to product use and the like. The package itself may contain more detailed information on a separate insert, if the amount of such information exceeds the carrying capacity of the label. In short, the label has met its purpose if it is sufficiently attractive, representative of the product manufacturer and informative of the product contents.
Typically, aside from detailed instructions on product use that may be contained in a package insert, the provider of the labeled package has given no particular consideration to functions the label or package could perform after the purchaser leaves the store and brings the product home. If the customer has purchased the labeled product, it can be assumed that the label has done its job.
Social networking has become an important and ubiquitous activity in the lifestyles of many people, consumers certainly included. The combination of universally available mobile communications devices and the desire of individuals to remain connected with peer groups and groups of other like-minded individuals, has led to the formation of social networks of various sizes and complexity. Individuals who interact through these networks can both provide information to others and avail themselves of information, virtually as soon as it becomes available.
One form of information that is of interest to consumers is real-time product-centric information. This is information relating to the use of specific products and groups of related products that would be difficult to obtain from other venues. Such product-centric information and the groups that disseminate and use it act, in effect, as self-help groups and can become co-creators of new uses for a product, offer chat-room type environments to discuss products and can suggest the development of new products to fill voids in suites of existing products.
To support product-centric networking, it would be exceedingly useful if a product itself, through developments in electronic packaging and labeling, can become an inexpensive communication device for the consumer and form a node in the product-centric network. Such communications devices, if made a part of the product itself, can immediately provide the consumer with embedded information that would register the product with the company producing it and provide identification of that particular product within the network. The company itself will ultimately wish to support such networking, because it serves to build product loyalty. This can be enabled through developments of the company's website to include means by which the consumer can communicate directly using the communications-enabled packaging to be discussed more fully below. Thus the company can become a repository of useful information about the product, which it can download to those consumers who possess the proper communications devices. For example, the manufacturer may wish to enable simple product registrations or inform the consumer about recalls or changes in formulations.
From the point of view of the consumer, this offers two modes of interaction. In one mode, the consumer uses the enabled product as the communications node and both uploads and downloads information from the company and to the company. In another mode, the consumer becomes part of a product-centric social network, which may include pre-existing communications methods and networks that extend beyond the enabled package, but which use the enabled package as an entry-point to the social network.
By partaking in such a product-centric network, the consumer can become a co-creator of new products, find new uses for old products, suggest product improvements and the like. In addition, the manufacturer can engage the consumer, through the network, in dialogues that benefit the manufacturer and for which the manufacturer can offer the consumer rewards, sent directly to the node. In effect, the network becomes a dedicated on-line test group for the manufacturer, for which the manufacturer should be properly appreciative.
Inexpensive communications devices are already widely available in the form of special use cell-phones. The circuitry that enables such mobile communications is small, highly integrated and inexpensive. Indeed, the most expensive parts of such communications devices are the packages that hold the circuitry, the keyboards for inputting phone numbers and the displays themselves. By reducing the complexity of this ancillary equipment and by using circuit fabrication techniques such as described in Jacobsen et al., U.S. Pat. No. 6,468,638, which is fully incorporated herein by reference, together with flexible keyboards such as described in Alfredsson et al. U.S. Pat. No. 6,774,818, which is fully incorporated herein by reference, and by powering the device with flexible power sources such as described in Islam et al. US 2004/0018422, fully incorporated herein by reference or as described in Kurtz et al. US 2008/0048102, fully incorporated herein by reference, a product package can be fabricated that will serve as a communications node in a product-centric network. It is the purpose of the present invention to provide the consumer with such a communication-enabled product package that forms a node in a product-centric social network.